English modals in American talk shows

The English modals are extremely difficult for English learners to acquire. This study examines a corpus of American speech to show how a speaker's view of the world takes grammatical form through 18 modals and semi-modals. It looks for core meanings and representative examples that translate wen to an ESOL classroom.; The study analyses a corpus of 150,000 words comprising the unscripted portions of TV talk shows aired in the early 1990s. It examines modal frequencies and uses in the formulaic exchanges of talk show participants as well as in substantive, topic-related talk. It also compares modal use in tabloid-type shows like Geraldo and current events shows like The News Hour and Nightline.; The study replicates some aspects of Jennifer Coates' 1983 work on modals in British English. Coates used spoken and written texts and a truth-conditional approach to semantics; this study uses only spoken texts and principles from Robert Allen's Sector Analysis, cognitive linguistics, and the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel to describe the syntactic simplicity of the modals, and their subtle, regularly indeterminate meanings. It looks at the power of the modals to express a speaker's perception of the outside world and forces affecting events and herself.; Findings of this study place would, can and will as the most frequently used modals, as does Coates, but be going to, want to and have to are next, and semi-modals represent 42% of all examples. Speakers in the study use have to, need to and have got to twenty times as frequently as must, and shall not at an. The grammatical forms modals take are simple---for example, the 88% of all tokens in this study that occur in combination with just the base form of a main verb---yet meanings elude strict categorization and often shade into one another. As Coates showed and this study confirms, the indeterminacy of modal semantics makes them at once challenging to researchers and teachers and highly adaptable to different contexts and communicative functions. They do share core meanings, and the study's collection of "best examples" will be immediately recognizable to the reader and often quite different from samples found in ESOL textbooks.